Two drives

AnonymousOct 21, 2010, 5:33 PM

Hello,Im a little dim at this and need some wise advice..just bought a pakbell with 500gb and seem to have two drives...c & d...c is nearly full and d is completely empty...am i meant to manually put pictures and large files onto drive d or does the pc do this when c drive is full??thank you

Files get placed where you specify. With some exceptions, the computer makes no attempt to figure out where you might want things to go.

Certain places are set as the default locations for certain files when the system is first set up. For example, the computer probably put its swap file on C:, and will have set up a folder called "My documents" with other sub-folders inside it where it places files by default. You always have the option, as you save files, to tell it to save them in another location. For example, although it will offer to place "Today's Text" (a hypothetical document you have just created in Word) in My Documents, YOU have the option to use "Save As ..." and tell it to place it instead in some folder that you have created on the D: drive.

You have not said what size your two drives are. But I have an idea what may have happened. First, some background on "drives". You say you have ONE hard drive, which I will call an HDD. It is a physical device with storage space available on it. Before you ever got to using it, someone had to do some space organizing. The first key part of this is to define certain contiguous regions of that HDD as "Partitions". A Partition is one chunk of space that your Operating System (e.g., Windows) will treat as one "drive" with its own letter name like "C:", able to contain files. Each Partition also has a File System installed on it (in a process called Formatting the "drive"), which consists of a few record-keeping hidden files that pertain only to what is stored on that "drive" (Partition), and not to the entire HDD unit.

Now, one common way to do all this is to create one smaller Partition (say, 60 GB) on which the Operating System and a few of its key files are installed, and then to create a much larger second Partition intended for all your file storage needs. The first Partition with the OS is what the machine boots from, and that means the OS will always name it C:. The second Partition will then become D:, most commonly. So I expect that is how your single hard disk appears to be two "drives", C: and D:.

Now, when you go to installing application software etc on your machine, by default it usually wants to install on the C: drive. Then, by default again, it offers to create folders for your files on that same C: drive. None of these installation packages suggests that D: would be a better place - they leave you to do that. In your case, PROBABLY what you should have done as you installed software is to tell it to create folders for files on the D: drive, instead of on C:. In addition (or more realistically, all part of this same scene), each application software package usually has options within it for you to specify where its own default locations are for data files, configuration files, spelling dictionaries, etc. You can create folders on the D: drive for these purposes, then go into each app software package and set its options to use those folders, instead of having to do it manually every time you access or create a file.

From where you are now, you should be able to change a bunch of these default settings. Start with Windows itself. It has default locations fort certain things like the entire My Documents folder, etc, that you can change to wherever you want. Change it from C: to D:, then copy / move your existing files to that new location. The fun part is, you can move EVERYTHING in a folder at one time, just by moving the FOLDER itself. You don't have to move each individual file. Then do this for your major application software. When you've moved a lot of your data files from C: to D: you can Delete the old copies on C:. THEN remember to Empty the Recycle Bin on C: so that the space there really is freed up.